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The First Enlightened Being?

Last Updated 24 February 2017, 03:43 IST

According to the yogic tradition, Shiva is not seen as a god, but as the Adiyogi or first Yogi and Adi Guru or the first Guru. He transmitted the yogic sciences to his seven disciples, the Saptarishis, on the banks of Kantisarovar, above Kedarnath in the Himalayas, at least 15,000 years ago. This was the first yoga program.

Was there no one who was ever aware before Adiyogi? There would have been someone who was aware. However, awareness is one thing, knowing is another thing, and an organized system of how to know is a completely different thing.

Adiyogi is significant, not just because he attained, but because he made the possibility available to everyone. He made it possible to approach the ultimate nature of who you are, in a scientific manner. He gave 112 fundamental ways, and from that, many permutations and combinations have evolved today. No one, either before or after, has spoken with the same elaborateness and clarity.

In the yogic lore, Adiyogi is described as carrying a weapon, and that describes the nature of the society of the day. People obviously lived in a clearly segregated manner, with tribes and ethnic identities. The survival instinct would have been strong in those times. It would have been natural, that when people crossed lines, it would lead to death. Obviously there was physical violence and Adiyogi adjusted himself to that situation. As much as he was a yogi who sat still, he was also a fighting man.

When he first appeared, many people gathered, including the Saptarishis, thinking he had something to offer. If there was no history of any kind of knowing, they would not have gathered. There definitely must have been some seeking, for them to even say, “You seem to know something that we do not know.” That means in some way, they were conscious that there was a higher possibility.

I feel that the society of the time must have been a stable society, where over a period of time, people matured and understood that the instinct of survival does not fulfill us – we need to empower the other dimension within us that is always longing to become infinite and expand in an unbounded way. We don’t know on what scale, but that realization definitely must have come.

Courtesy : isha.sadhguru.org

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(Published 24 February 2017, 03:43 IST)

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